Monday evening after returning from the Atlantic Ocean, I returned to my sister's house in Glassboro, packed my stuff and headed across the Walt Whitman Bridge and I could just barely hear his words, my tires bouncing in the cracks between, like the rhythm of his voice speaking of a shared lover. And I drove into the darkening night with 18-wheelers for company. Just north of Harrisburg I saw that familiar bed sign on the road side and I jumped off of the exit and was greeted by the spinning red and blues of a cop car blocking the motel driveway. A young cop just out of high school looking, walked up and told me that a swat team was at the motel and I couldn't go there just then. "Thank you, I get the feeling I'll not be staying here the night after all". And so I headed on into the mountains finally landing in some small town with a gas station and a burger king and a single older motel called the Port Royal Motel with it's red neon "Vacancy" sign lit up "open 24 hours".

I was thinking the whole time this is a dream, it's a dream, driving down the back roads in New Jersey at 3 AM and the motel that I booked on expedia, no one answers the phone and finally a sleepy youngish Africa American dude shows up and tells me they don't have any rooms and I think, well I'll just stay up all night then, drive through the pine barrens, through the swamps with the cooling fog and land on the beach and the southern most tip, on the edge of the Delaware river where it kisses the Atlantic, swirling in whirlpools, like those June field trips from Grade school with Mindy on the beach without her viola, just a shell lifted to her ear and the sounds of surf.

My sister's dogs whining at 5AM Sunday morning and I couldn't sleep but laid there watching the peach pickers carry things across the street to the truck, buckets, bats for whacking off the too many peaches so the remainder are large enough for the current market. My brother-in-law with the 12 gauge in the back of the red F150 pickup, surveying the land, looking out for the deer who feast on new trees and his philosophy of "if you have it spend it, but if you don't, don't", Farmer by evening and weekend and physician during the day-week. And I'm up before anyone, letting the dogs out and the house alarm is set off and I had forgotten about this kind of fear, remembering the shouting, gunshot in the night and my own alarm system and the bars on the doors and back windows where my children were born. It always felt like being 99.9 percent locked in while being safe 0.1 percent, and one day we moved, and one day I was moved.

The packing house where I cut my back one summer after leaning against some moving piece of machinery after looking at peaches rolling across a conveyor belt for 12 hours, 4 days and I didn't go back after that and at $1.50 an hour I had enough for cheap thrills enough to be carried to an ambulance for a night in the ER, the pants that were tight just a few months ago, now falling off of my hips, muscle tone gone, watching dark man through black windows steal everything from the house next door.

I slipped through the fields, passed the pool wild with children cooling on a hot late spring weekend day and the school bus parking lot now quiet and the trees around the field, the same one I walked Marianne through from the Crossing apartments to her house in Lakeside, that morning they knew she spend the night with me. And the paths through the woods now so changed. It had always been that paths were created to get from one point to another but now the points have changed but one old path remained, the one leading to the creek, that same creek where a tree fell over it and a boy a little older then me leaned a girl against the tree. But he had a cigarette and he burned her. She shouted at him and Michael and I hid even more. I gathered four stones, two from the side of the stream and two from the bottom of the creek and I build a circle and I stood there without my shoes watching the light through the leaves, the water bugs skate across the water, the cart from somewhere rust just a slight amount more. Nothing is ever really forgotten and forgiveness is a human concept because life just keeps moving and love just keeps moving and forgiveness is a concept when we fall out of love, out of life. But when we fall into it there is no need for forgiveness because it is enough.

And here I was right in the heart of Pennsylvania, in Poe Valley, that place I dreamed of a year ago, the humming of the 17 year locus from the south side of the mountains, the abandoned park, the draining lake, the wind that followed me up to the ridge line, stirred the leaves in the tree tops before descending on me with her airy hugs. I felt I was dieing standing on those rocks in a field of dead trees with the black locust's with their orange eyes and two eagles flew over head and a feather in my path. And I asked her, which way should I go?

22 X 28" Watercolor on paper

That evening after you left me sitting by the Lillie pads,

The swamplands

Where wooden boats

Were brought in under the cover of night

And you know they are building now

Above the alcove

Where we lounged that August

Seventeen years ago

Our legs were touching

And I didn't dare move and

I wondered if you noticed

I wanted to say something but

I couldn't

Lest the magic be lost

Like something alive

And buried in the Earth

Covered in the warm darkness

Covered in snow

So I risk nothing and I lost nothing

Just Lillie pads

Floating in the evening light

And even their forms I can't conceive

It's always just the hum of cicadas

On the south side

Of this mountain

That seem to hush

The moment you get close enough

To touch one.

And her arms are the wind

Swirling in the tree tops

And her kiss

Rain

The lost lake of Lakeside Drive

Is now gone

Or maybe I just couldn't find it again

The tree I sat on had to be there then

Because I needed it to be there then

And now

I wander through a grove

Of white Rhododendron

Hearing the hum

So close that I think

It must be me

singing